Festivals and Events

In April, come to Long Beach [1] for the Ragtime Rhodie Dixieland Jazz Festival. Then comes Ocean Park’s [2] Garlic Festival, held the third weekend of June, which features garlic shucking and garlic eating contests, plus all sorts of garlicky meals. Bring a couple of bottles of Listerine along.

Long Beach hosts the annual 4th of July Fireworks on the Beach, and Ocean Park has a popular Street Fair the same weekend. Then comes Sandsations Sand Sculptures at the end of the month.

The year’s biggest event, the Washington State International Kite Festival (www.kitefestival.com [3]) lasts the entire third week of August and draws well over 200,000 spectators and participants. This is the largest kite festival in the western hemisphere, and every day brings a different contest, ending with Sunday’s grand finale in which the sky teems with upwards of 4,000 kites of all sorts. The world record for keeping a kite aloft (over 180 hours) was set here in 1982.

Ocean Park [2] hosts an enormously popular classic car show, the Rod Run to the End of the World, on the second weekend of September that ends with a 15-mile-long parade.

The annual Cranberrian Fair, held in Ilwaco [4] in mid-October, celebrates more than a century of coastal cranberry farming. Bog tours give you the chance to see the flooded fields with thousands of floating berries awaiting harvest.

It’s followed the third weekend of October by Water Music Festival with chamber music concerts all over the peninsula.